Simplify African Fields

[M00Z1LLA]

African Fields are way too small and tedious to deal with. This isn’t AoE2 where people think wasting half your APM on fiddling with drop off points and re-seeding farms is “skill”.

Issues

Every other faction needs to place a dozen farming buildings at most while the Africans will have to place closer to 40. They also have to be manually switched over to coin, but this can only be done once constructed. Since they are hard to select and take an inordinate amount of time to build, setting them to the right resource is very tedious. This in conjunction with needing to pay attention to the Livestock Market makes managing the economies of the African civs far more demanding than any other civs.

Solution

The obvious solution to cut down on the demands of Fields would be to make them bigger. Having 6 workers per Field instead of 3 would more than halve the amount of attention that they would need (they’ve already backtracked from the 2 workers per Field that was at launch).

The problem with enlarging Fields is how to preserve the satisfying tessellation of Fields and Granaries. This could be retained by simply lobbing off the corners of the Fields so they can still be placed flush to a Granary. This can be seen in the pictures below:

Old Field Layout

In the current layout of Fields, a Granary will cast its aura over 1 5/8ths of a Field.

New Field Layout

Overall, these new larger fields would be 1.5x the side length, and slightly more than double the area covered by the current fields, so supporting 6 workers would make the most sense.

Granary Aura

The current range over which Granaries cast their gathering boost aura is 17 and the larger Fields would extend out to a range of 18 in the corners for a configuration with 8 Fields per Granary. This would leave a small sliver outside of the aura, but in practice, workers generally stay in the middle regions of Fileds, and would nearly always be within the aura.

To make placement a little more forgiving, the Granary aura could be extended by 1 to allow bigger Fields to fit perfectly. However, since this would also buff hunting, Granaries could be given a very small 25 wood cost. If this was done, the starting cattle should also probably be made fatter accordingly to enable paying for the first Granary, and their build time could be reduced slightly.

[M00Z1LLA]

It took me a dozen tries to upload these images because they were censored in the hyperlink. Please fix this draconian censorship stupidity in the forums and don’t delete the text within posts.

It is to the point where units like these guys can’t even be talked about because the names are censored!

[FeldherrTobi]

Very good point mate! This field mechanic is really not needed in AOE3 i think, but since it is there i agree with you. 6 workers per field would be fine. Also i would love to see a reduction in build time of these fields

[Quirriff]

They’ve already buffed them from 2 villagers to 3 and the granary aura is square not circular.

They’re good as they are, I just miss the days where cherokee basket weaving reduced everything in the granary to 0.

[EliteRiflemann]

I Will take this in account

[M00Z1LLA]

@Quirriff

They’ve already buffed them from 2 villagers to 3 and the granary aura is square not circular.

That just shows how much they missed the mark initially. And yes, I’m aware the aura is square, it’s the dashed line on my pictures.

[coffeeco01]

making the fields larger seems like a step backwards to me given that they will substantially eat up space within your base.

since they eat up more than double the current field space, they would have to increase the worker count to more than 6 in order to make it more space efficient

Personally the problem I have is that they are difficult to toggle between food and coin selectively since double clicking the fields select too many. Allowing the granaries to be the toggle for a group of fields is the easiest solution like how rice paddies works.

The second is steal a page off the aoe 4 handbook and allow algorithmic placing of fields by clicking a centre granaries so you dont have to carefully place individual fields.

[M00Z1LLA]

@coffeeco01

they will substantially eat up space within your base.

since they eat up more than double the current field space, they would have to increase the worker count to more than 6 in order to make it more space efficient

My example is x2.125 the area of current fields so that’s basically unchanged from how it currently is. You can support 48 workers on one block of 8 of them which seems like enough for me. You could bump it up to 7, but that seems a little less elegant.

@coffeeco01

Personally the problem I have is that they are difficult to toggle between food and coin selectively since double clicking the fields select too many. Allowing the granaries to be the toggle for a group of fields is the easiest solution like how rice paddies works.

Changing them over is the biggest pain, but even just assigning workers is annoying when there are so many. One issue with having granaries as the assignment point is that they aren’t strongly linked to a field. Would it affect only fields fully in their aura or partially. And what happens when they overlap? It’s doable, but certainly not as simple as rice paddies.

@coffeeco01

The second is steal a page off the aoe 4 handbook and allow algorithmic placing of fields by clicking a centre granaries so you dont have to carefully place individual fields

This would also be nice, but it still works rather poorly when there are obstacles. Bigger fields, algorithmic placement, and easier toggling all together would be the best combination.

[OriginalKnot717]

I find them ok tbh, I usually just prepare by having 1 villager set up a lot of fields just shift clicking them around a granary then when I need to move to fields I can just put however many vills on there and they sort themselves into each field. The advanced field card can be quite nice for this because you can set all the fields up for free just using 1 villager.

[OperaticShip743]

They should also self-plant like AOE-4 farms. Where the barn would be the equivalent of the mill and the crops are self-planted around it.

[coffeeco01]

@M00Z1LLA

Changing them over is the biggest pain, but even just assigning workers is annoying when there are so many. One issue with having granaries as the assignment point is that they aren’t strongly linked to a field. Would it affect only fields fully in their aura or partially. And what happens when they overlap? It’s doable, but certainly not as simple as rice paddies.

realistically it should be a toggle for the intimidate adjacent fields (i even think on some level diagonal fields shouldn’t count) so if a field was in between 2 granaries, it would just be changed to whatever was selected on the current granary

the reason for this is 2 fold
a) you dont want to switch too many fields at once any way since lategame ecos are often very finely balanced so at best you want to switch like 10-20 workers max. even in the current system, the 4 fields directly touching the granary would be 12 vils so toggling 1-2 granary is enough.
b) it encourages proper field placements, which will also be helped by auto field placements (pls), the optimal build currently is to space 2 fields between granaries to maximise the aura coverage, and that will also help with the toggling not affect the inbetween farms as well

This is also why I dont like the block of 6 idea when combined with the granary toggling, even just for directly connected fields that would mean at minimum 24 workers switching at once, which is way too big of an eco swing.

So if we are doing bigger fields then it goes against the granary toggling

[EIGuimaraes]

I would just increase the max workers per Field to 5 and keep all the other stuff the same. IMO the biggest issues of the Fields are the space they take and how long it takes you to realize how many villagers all your Fields can support.

[EliteRiflemann]

Done

Now we can say “Oromo Warrior” and “Chincha Raft”

Next time, I recommend that you tell a staff member privately and not make an off-topic comment, please.

[M00Z1LLA]

Thanks, I wasn’t really sure where to take the issue. There were topics on the AoE4 forum and nothing was getting resolved.

Did you just make Chincha Rafts and Oromo an exception, or is the whole system fixed?

The ######### empire was another thing that was getting censored. Unfortunately instead of just censoring the flagged part like “Ma###ahit” or realizing the context, it deletes the whole word even in the original post. It’s even more annoying with links.

#########################################

This is what I’m trying to refer to. It looks like the system is still horribly broken.

[M00Z1LLA]

An alternate solution could be to simply merge 2 fields together into a rectangular shape as pictured below. If you rotate them, you can get them just as compact as before.

In total, you can fit 6 fields like this within the coverage of a Granary.

If you don’t rotate them like the layout below, you still get almost total Granary coverage. Only the protruding middle bits are not covered, and villagers generally stand in the middle of fields so it is near total coverage anyways. I’d even be in favour of increasing the Granary radius to fully cover the longest dimension and giving them a small cost. That would let you support 8 fields per Granary and make them more forgiving to use for hunting.

For placing these fields, you could either hold shift and scroll to rotate, or have two options for the different orientations in the build menu. Africans have lots of empty slots available so it isn’t much of an issue. The different orientations could also have different default resources when built (but once built could be toggled to the other resource). These fields could even be separately selectable so you could more easily select and toggle only a portion of your fields at a time.

Example of build grid:
→

The new grid is also a lot more consistent with the default European layout.

European buildings for comparison:

Overall build time could be 20 seconds like every other agricultural building. Cost could be increased to 150 wood to make it more comparable to other buildings like Mills or Estates.

It is also really strange why fields are not buildable in age 1. Is this to idiot-proof the game against AoE2 players?